Jacie Williams is a junior majoring in communication. She can be contacted at [email protected].Dedication is not a popular topic of conversation. It is not something people spend a lot of time thinking about.
This really is a shame. The further people move from dedication, the more problems they tend to encounter. It does not always suddenly happen, but eventually the problems catch up with you.
A popular example would be a girl cheating on her boyfriend. She might get away with it for a week, a month or maybe even longer. Sooner or later it is going to come out, though.
Depending on the guy, it may or may not end in a breakup, but it is going to cause problems. Being dedicated to your significant others shows, above anything else, that you care.
In economic terms, dedication is also important. Do not misunderstand me to be saying responsibility lies only on the employee’s end. We like to work for companies that promote from within the company.
This is an example of being dedicated. Upward mobility in companies means that employers are dedicated to their employees. In other words, they care.
The same principle holds true for students in classrooms. If a student skips class often, it gives the teacher the impression that the student does not care about the class.
What I am getting at here is that by showing dedication, people show that they care.
What led me to this conclusion was another Veteran’s Day coming and going and the war we are currently fighting. Look at what happened. Our country was attacked. Most of us were still in high school or just starting college.
For the most part, whether or not we want to admit it now, we were very patriotic for quite some time afterward. We wanted justice and we wanted revenge. We wanted war.
There were veterans who tried to bring future problems to our attention and said at the time that we needed to think about war twice before making a commitment. We did not listen, and the war began.
Then something happened.
I do not know the exact correlation, but if I had to take a guess, it was when we stopped caring that we stopped being dedicated to our cause in the Middle East.
Stop and think about what that means. That means that we no longer care that our fellow Americans are across seas and dying for a cause that we no longer believe in. It is almost despicable.
What happened to the outrage and fear produced on Sept. 11? Why do we no longer care that the Twin Towers fell and innocent Americans died?
Now for the real kicker: Even if we no longer believe in the cause for which we first went to war, we can’t just leave, not without creating more problems for ourselves in the future, that is.
Think about it. We could leave the Middle East now and turn our backs.
We would not know if the history books in the future would call it a win or a loss. The lines are not that clearly drawn.
All that leaving now would accomplish would be another major self-inflicted headache in 20 or 30 years. Can you imagine an entire generation of people in Iraq with their only memories of Americans being of bombs and violence?
All they would know would be hate for us.
It would be better to stay. I do not mean for another five years. I do not mean for another ten years. I mean we have to stay with them. We have to help them, an entire generation of people who would otherwise hate us.
Fixing this situation – if fixing is the correct word here – will require an amazing amount of dedication. It is going to cost us a lot of money.
We are tearing down a nation just to build it back up. You don’t believe me? Look at Japan.
We did worse than bomb them. We could have left them in pieces. Instead we helped them rebuild. Considering that many of our grandfathers fought a war with them, our relationship is amazing.
After World War I, Germany was left in shambles. Out of that mess, we ended with World War II.
After World War II, people cried the same thing. Why should we spend our money rebuilding another country? Our relationship with Germany is also very good and I very much doubt they are going to start a World War any time soon.
Were people happy that we stayed there for so long? I doubt it. But despite some people’s objections, our dedication has paid off in the long run.